Over the first 15 years of this century, as efforts against the “big three” global infectious diseases — HIV, malaria and tuberculosis — accelerated, the numbers of new HIV infections dropped by 32 percent, and the number of deaths caused by the virus declined by 31 percent. Malaria infections dropped by 18 percent, and deaths from that disease went down by 48 percent. Efforts to control tuberculosis were not nearly as successful, a recently released report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes, with new cases globally dropping by about 1 percent, and deaths — not counting the numbers of tuberculosis-related deaths among people with HIV — falling by 22 percent.

LIVERPOOL, England – Of all the hardships confronting tuberculosis patients in Vietnam, the most expensive is the time it takes. That includes the time lost to doctor visits in pursuit of a diagnosis, the time lost to getting and taking treatment. Then, for patients debilitated by illness and by the drugs hoped to deliver a cure, as well as for the family members who care for them, it includes the time lost that used to be spent working, particularly among families that had depended on every dollar coming in. Those costs alone account for about 68 percent of the costs of being a tuberculosis patient in Vietnam, and the reason that at least 59 percent of people being treated for the disease have incurred financial losses categorized as catastrophic by the World Health Organization.

February 4, 2016 - With a focus on both scaled up goals and limited funding, PEPFAR released its Technical Considerations for COP/ROP 2016 this week, outlining strategies necessary to provide access to testing and effective treatment to more people immediately, while maintaining efforts to confront tuberculosis and deliver other essential prevention and health services.

More than 600 physicians and scientists called on President Obama in a letter Tuesday to release a national plan for research and programming needed to fight the spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis at home and abroad, and to back the plan with a budget proposal that allots the dollars necessary to effect it.

If an argument is needed against prioritizing United States medical research dollars simply on the basis of disease burden in the U.S., global health advocates in Washington, DC didn’t have to look any farther this week than the National Institutes of Health campus in Maryland. That’s where a woman who recently flew from India to Chicago and has since been diagnosed with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis is now being treated.

Populations with needs that can and do affect the impacts of tuberculosis treatments are among the most vulnerable to the disease, make up significant proportions of the total of people sick with the disease worldwide, but are also the most neglected in TB drug development efforts. An article in a recently released Journal of Infectious Diseases supplement on tuberculosis drug development explores the challenges that developing products of appropriate doses and formulations for children, people with HIV, people with diabetes and pregnant women as well as the opportunities that meeting those challenges present.

Redeployment: Opportunities to Control HIV and TB in Tanzania, Observations from Dar es Salaam, Mbeya, and Zanzibar looks at successes, challenges, gaps in public health responses, and at how to deliver “the right things to the right places at the right time.”

“Antibiotic resistance is a global health problem that requires international attention and collaboration because bacteria do not recognize borders”, National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria.

A program that screened more than 7000 inmates for tuberculosis at four South Africa correctional facilities showed that a large number of inmates could be diagnosed with TB and quickly begin treatment in a setting where confronting the disease is widely considered critical to broader public health objectives, an article released today in Open Forum Infectious Diseases says. The authors say the results counter arguments that large scale screening, diagnosis and treatment of TB in correctional settings is cost prohibitive and impractical. An evaluation of the program found that screening and using GeneXpert technology in the prisons and jails led to 201 diagnoses of the disease, and the start of treatment for at least 187 of those inmates.

First, a word about the significance of bedaquiline. The first new antituberculosis drug to be developed in nearly half a century, it was given fast-tracked approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at the end of 2012 to speed access to the drug for the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who had run out of other options to treat multidrug-resistant TB. Developed by pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, the breakthrough medicine came with caveats. It had not yet been as widely tested as a drug is optimally required to be before reaching the market, and in limited trials, it was linked to a prolonged interval between heart beats that was noted as a potentially fatal side effect. But those tests also showed the drug hastened and sustained clearance of tuberculosis bacteria, improved cure rates and reduced periods of infectiousness. And, unlike the treatment that was the last resort for multidrug-resistant patients at the time, it did not cause irreversible hearing loss. When the FDA approved bedaquiline, with more testing to be done, it became the new last resort.